On Mon, 2003-05-26 at 21:08, Ruben Alvarez wrote:

I'm looking for the most efficient OpenSource IMAP server and I am told that Dovecot Server is a good solution.

Anyway, I have inspected the source code and I think Dovecot is not a multi-threaded server, but a forked server. I am surprised about this issue, because threads perfomance should be higher than creating a new process for each connection....I suppose.

Well, I actually already replied privately to this when it was sent to imap-list, but here's a more complete answer for everyone:

Threads are useful when you have a lot of data to share across the threads. For anything else they're not worth the trouble and can actually be even slower than processes in some cases because of extra locking it needs. In UNIX that is. In Windows processes are a lot heavier than threads.

Pretty much the only case in IMAP server when you want to share data is when a mailbox is opened multiple times by different connections. Dovecot already shares the data in that case because it's all in the index files that are mmap()ed.

Processes also provide safety. You can't accidentally read someone else's mails because of a bug in the server. Or if you happen to learn how to crash the server, you can kill only your own connection. With threaded server you would have killed everyone's connections.

By the other hand, ¿do anybody know any multi-threaded OpenSource IMAP server?. I would like test performance of Dovecot server versus a multi-threaded one.

Biggest performance differences between IMAP servers is how smartly they store the message data and how smartly they're able to read it in a way that IMAP clients want them.

CPU usage is pretty irrelevant in IMAP servers. It's I/O that is going to be your bottleneck. I optimize CPU usage only when it's clearly showing somewhere (SEARCH BODY is a lot slower than grepping the files, I'd have to figure out why some day).